A Storm Beneath Lightning

Outside, the landscape is a blur of rain and windblown foliage. The downpour is too thick to see even a few feet ahead of oneself, but the lit windows of the mansion dot the darkness.

Inside, Hazel is seated to dinner with her father and Mr.McMahon, coaxing Mr.McMahon into the promise of gifts from Pennsylvania or wherever he next travels on mercantile business.

“We trade for perfumes mostly, lass. There are fabrics enough to make you look like a princess. Or to make your father pass for a fashionable woman.”

Hazel laughs, glancing to Mr.Everill for his reaction, but he only smiles at his colleague.

“Is Miss de Laqua purchasing from the company in Pennsylvania?” Hazel asks.

“I believe so. My apologies, I’m not sure your father could outdo her impeccable style even if she were given rags and he silks.”

“Maybe he would hope to smell better, then,” Hazel says, after taking a sip of wine.

The rain-spiked wind blows open a window, bringing with it the howling wind and a gust of cold that distinguishes the candles. A harried-looking maid rushes to close them, then lights the candles, which cast dancing shadows over the dining room and its occupants once more.

“By buying perfume, lass? I’m not sure he would share your enthusiasm for it. But they’re in such a multitude of colours, and etched by artists. In small coloured glass, and smelling like roses and lilies.”

“Please promise to bring one back for me,” Hazel says, the meal before her forgotten.

“I’m not sure there is a perfume I could buy you that you do not already own in your garden,” Mr.McMahon says between mouthfuls of poached oyster.

“But I don’t have any perfume,” Hazel protests. “My mother had bottles and bottles of it-“ She quickly shuts her mouth and resumes eating her salad.

Mr.Everill departs the room, saying nothing as her slides the door open, then closes it behind him.

“Perhaps I should relocate myself to the woods. He cannot stand even my presence anymore,” Hazel says, without bitterness, as Mr.McMahon sips his wine.

“It is harder for him now. The older you get the more like your mother you are,” Mr.McMahon says.

“I would be more like my sister than my mother if she were still alive,” Hazel counters.

Mr.McMahon puts his glass down on the table.

“There was nothing you could have done, nor he. You were a child at the time and she was of delicate health. Your father simply doesn’t beliee it. He has much to recover from. I am sorry you are caught in the turmoil, but he does love you.”

Hazel ignores his latter comment as she replies. “He has had years to grieve. I never mention mother at all. How much time does he need? He cannot possibly even remember her anymore.”

Mr.McMahon turns his wine glass around, watching it sparkle as it catches the light of the candles in their candelabras. “I have reason to believe your father remembers her with great clarity. I have seen him many times gazing at his accounts without seeing them, and it is not typeset letters or signatures he is looking at. Time is peculiar. Years can pass and something that happened long ago can feel as fresh as yesterday. Your lifetime has gone by without her, and he still sometimes expects her to join you for dinner.”

Hazel does not meet the stare aimed at her. The shifting light enhances the hollows of her eyes. “And my sister? Does he not care about my sister? She died too. He has never spoken of her.”

When Hazel looks back at Mr.McMahon he is regarding her with an expression both sympathetic and guarded. He leans forward in his seat, as though he means to whisper, but the tenor of his voice does not change.

“He never wanted you to carry that burden, lass. He did not want to let you have such a heavy secret.”

“It was not his secret to keep,” Hazel says, her voice rising.

“Yes, you’re right. But he cannot mourn your sister the same was he can your mother. Were he to see your sister’s ghost, he would not recognize her.”

Mr.McMahon’s words pique Hazel’s interest, prompting her to ask him a question she has not dared ask until now.

“Do you believe in ghosts, Mr.McMahon?”

Surprised by her sudden curiousity, Mr.McMahon leans back in his chair. “No. Not quite. Do you?”

Hazel does not answer, instead lifting her fork to her mouth, pausing, and setting it down without taking a bite.

“You want to be weary of the spirits, they envy the living. They aren’t kind things.”

Hazel frowns, the only spirit she has known has never exhibited any sign of malice or even jealousy. “They aren’t all bad.”

Mr.MacMahon looks thoughtful. “Aye, but the angry spirits are monsters. You may not realize it and they may not either, it is the condition of monsters to  blind to their own evil. Do the red caps thing they are cruel for dying their caps with blood? Do kelpies drag their riders to the depths of the ocean to be deliberately unkind?”

“What of spirits that do not harbour anger?” Hazel asks, with reserved attentiveness.

“They are like the fey. The Fair Folk. The fairies are cold and fickle. They are well-coiffed carions, though they do not think it. They want for things they cannot have.”

There is a movement in the hallway, just beyond the sliding glass door of the dining room. While Mr.McMahon or her father might credit the motion to the flickering candlelight or some number of reflections, Hazel knows the cause immediately.

Mr.McMahon continues, noticing nothing amiss. “Fairy tales are important. They tell us that beauty can hide evil, or anger can hide great sorrow.” Mr.McMahon looks up and holds her gaze so she cannot look away. “But they do not just tell us that dragons exist, they also tell us dragons can be beaten.”

Hazel pulls her chair back from the table, bothered by the flickering figure in the hallway. “Perhaps they aren’t always that way,” she says uncertainly, as she stands. “Please excuse me, I must- I must speak with the kitchen staff. I will be back.”

Hazel does not hear Mr.McMahon’s polite response as she exits the room, plunging into the darkened hallway.

She is standing next to the door, a bit of her shoulder disappearing in the light, part of her face a stream of dust motes.

Hazel stands silently, waiting for her to speak. She still exhibits anxiety in and around the mansion, and her presence cannot mean anything good.

They stay close enough to the window that Hazel can see the garden where the fiercest rain has seized it, the dented bushes and splintering trellises hung with forlorn roses.

Hazel must lift her voice to be heard above the din of the rain pattering against the windows.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she says, eyes flickering to Mr.McMahon. “But it’s important.”

“What is it?” Hazel asks, half relieved to escape the dinner conversation with a subject she is sure her father would not deem appropriate for dinner, half frustrated that she has had to leave Mr.McMahon so unceremoniously.

“It has come closer to the house. There isn’t much time, now,” she says, turning her gaze upon the window. She seems to be looking through the glass, into the rain, but Hazel can see nothing but watery rivers on the glass.

“Alright,” Hazel consents, nodding. “But I must come back before father notices I’m missing.” She says this out of habit, and partially concern for leaving Mr.McMahon all alone in the dining room.

They descend several staircases, winding down into the hallway in which maids bustle and go about their chores. They do not glance at Hazel, having grown up with a child as comfortable in the staff’s working areas as the rest of the house.

Hazel knows they cannot see her.

She leads them to a door that opens to a corner of the garden. Unsheltered save for the greenery that lends shade in the summer, and the fountain that is cold as ice in the winter.

Hazel pushes on the door, and for a brief moment is dismayed at the possibility it could be lost.

Hazel pushes on it again and the door gives, swinging open to reveal the wet muddy garden and positions herself so she can see it from the doorway. She tries in vain to keep her drain dry, tugging the hem up to protect it from the brunt of the rain.

The garden smells of petrichor and lightning-charged ozone.

The wind pushes the rain onto the tiles, distorting their usual gravitational pattern. Hazel steps forward and pulls the door firmly closed behind her, and astonishing feat considering the rain, and gasps as the rain engulfs her and she is left in darkness.

“What is it? What are we doing?” Hazel asks.

She puts a finger to her lips, and points into the shadowy garden.

Hazel falters, standing still as she blinks water out of her eyes.

The wolf is prowling the gardens, far enough away that they are protected by the shadowed niche of the wall.

Its progress is almost undetectable, for it moves in a horizontal line through the gardens, as though stalking a perimeter, but it is slowly approaching the mansion.

Hazel inches along the mansion wall, fingers slipping over stone and brick, treading on mud speckled crocuses. She turns to the ghost.

She walks calmly, as though there is no rain. Her hair rests around her shoulders, only shifting slightly, as though a slight breeze passed through it.

The wind whips Hazel’s hair in damp coils across her face.

“What is it doing?” Hazel says, staying as quiet as she can while yelling over the din of the rain.

The rain splatters up off the mud, and pelts the wolf, streaking through it like knifes through smoke.

“Searching. For what has been lost.”

The wolf looks up, toward the pitch black sky, where what once was Hazel’s mother’s window is latched securely, though the glass in its green painted frame rattles with the force of the wind, and the clematis surrounding it trembles in the onslaught.

The wolf appears unaffected by the elements.

Something is forming in Hazel’s mind, and inchoate idea that she cannot quite acknowledge in the rain and the dark next to a ghost.

“I had a sister once, did you know that?” Hazel says, after a significant pause. But when she turns she finds the spot next to her empty. 

Text by Lucie MacAulay